The invention relates to a floor, wall, or ceiling panel, which has a carrier plate and a topside veneer, and a method for the production of such a floor, wall, or ceiling panel.
Panels with a top or cover layer of real wood are in particular used as real wood floors or parquet floors. Such floors provide a natural living atmosphere. They feel pleasantly warm underfoot and compensate humidity fluctuations in the room air, which contributes to a healthy room atmosphere. Also very popular are floor boards with a top or cover layer made of cork or a cork veneer.
A method for producing parquet or veneer floorboards with a top layer of real wood is described in DE 102 45 914 A1. In this reference a top layer of real wood is impregnated with thermosetting synthetic resins. After impregnation the top layer is glued to the carrier plate. The top layer is also printed.
Common are floor panels with a three-layer construction and profiled joining surfaces at the side borders for forming joining means in the form of groove and tongues or a so-called click system. The joining means enable a mechanical coupling of the individual panels with each other in a floor covering or a wall or ceiling covering. The carrier plate is usually made of a wood material, in particular a highly compressed fiber plate (HDF). The topside cover layer of real wood can have different thicknesses. In parquet floors the cover layer of wood has a thickness of more than 2.5 mm. According to a common terminology used in the art, veneers for cover layers of floor panels start at about 0.4 mm. Generally floor panels with wood cover layers of smaller than 2.5 mm are referred to as real wood or veneer floors.
After the gluing of the veneer flaws in the surface, for example branch holes or cracks, are smoothened. Usually an excess of smoothening compound is used and subsequently removed again. This is usually performed by grinding or brushing. In particular in the case of thin veneer layers this involves the risk that the subsequent mechanical processing may damage the layer. For this reason oftentimes veneers are used that are thicker to begin with or veneers that have flaws are sorted out beforehand. However, this is uneconomical and also diminishes the variability of the optical appearance of the natural wood floors.
Also known is a so-called real wood laminate. In this case an overlay is applied to the cover layer made of veneer for example in the form of a melamine paper or melamine film. Subsequently this sandwich is then pressed. A disadvantage is that the flaws naturally occurring in this product, such as gaps, cracks, branches or pores oftentimes appear milky. The cause for this is the missing or insufficient pressing pressure during the pressing process because in the region of the flaws the counter pressure is absent. On the other hand when a higher pressure is applied, the texture of the press plate dominates the wood surface and the natural wood texture or optic suffers.